For example they have developed an ant apparatus that uses microscope "antennas" on your hands to transmit a 50-fold magnified view of wherever your hand is resting. Watch their promo video:

As you can see, they've also developed a head-mounted solenoid compass that's supposed to provide a bird's sense of a direction. There's also a cool child to adult converter, which lets a kid see the world from an adult's height and speak in a deeper voice. I would have loved that when I was 10.

A picture's worth a thousand words. Sometimes even more. I think that's especially true when trying to imagine microscopic organisms and molecules, that simply can't be seen with the naked eye. And even better than a flat picture is a three-dimensional model that you can move and manipulate.

I have on good authority that it used to be that if you wanted to create a 3D image on your home computer you would have to invest in expensive software and wait seemingly forever for models to be processed or rendered. But almost a decade ago, Blender - a free open source 3D modeling application - was released to the public. And over the years personal computers have gotten fast enough that it doesn't take days to render your images.

The image at the top is one of the Blender Magazine sample images in the process of rendering. I actually don't have any experience making 3D animations myself. Thanks to Brian (who does use Blender) for pointing the magazine out to me!

The finalists in the 2010 Dance Your Ph.D. contest have been announced. The competition is open to all science PhDs (or soon-to-be-PhDs) willing submit a video of a dance interpretation of their PhD thesis. And yes, the author of the thesis has to be one of the dancers.

A finalist for each category - Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Social Science - was announced last week. The finalist in biology was "How does your brain analyze incoming visual information?", by Utrecht University gradutate student Maartje de Jong.

She explains:

We tend to believe what we see with our eyes is real and accurate. What we often do not realize is that our eyes register only a reflection of the outside world. To reconstruct reality from this reflection we have to rely on inferences and assumptions. It is like putting together the pieces of a puzzle without any knowledge about the whole picture. Our brain does this without our conscious awareness. In a split second it organizes and interprets incoming visual information to form a stable and meaningful image of the world around us.

[. . . snip . . . ]

Our video explains the basics of how the brain analyzes visual information. You see a man (‘the observer’) watching a movie-clip on his laptop. The visual information presented on his laptop is registered by his eyes and translated into neural signals that enter his brain. Through dance we portray what happens inside the observer’s brain. The leading dancer in the video, who can be recognized by the brain depicted on his clothing, represents the observer’s internal neural factors, such as his goals and experiences. The dancers with an information-icon depicted on their clothing (‘the i-dancers’) represent the incoming visual information.

Look at the two images of the H1N1 influenza virus - the strain that causes swine flu - on the right.

The first is a three-dimensional illustration that shows different parts of the virus in different colors - the hemagglutinin protein on the surface is blue, for example, while the RNA and associated proteins inside the virus are green.

The second is an electron micrograph image of the same virus. It's a more "realistic" depiction of the influenza virus than the 3D illustration, but it has been artificially colored.

UK artist Luke Jerram was intrigued by the fact that both types of images false in their own way. To explore how artificial coloring can affect our understanding, he worked with University of Bristol virologist Andrew Davidson to create a series of clear glass sculptures that accurately depict different viruses including the influenza virus, HIV, SARS and smallpox.

The series is a reflection of my interest in how images of phenomena are represented and presented to the public. I’m colour blind and this has given me a natural interest in exploring the edges of perception.

Often images of viruses are taken in black and white on an electron microscope and then they are coloured artificially using Photoshop. Sometimes that will be for scientific purposes but other times it will be just to add emotional content or to make the image more attractive.

The problem is that you end up with the public believing that viruses are these brightly coloured objects. These are often portrayed in newspapers as having an air of scientific authenticity and objective truth, whereas actually that isn’t the case. You can end up with some images that potentially promote fear.

Perhaps you have clips already sitting on your hard drive that are beautiful but are just gathering digital dust, or maybe film gathering a layer of the real stuff in the attic. They need a home too!

It could be a sunrise from your bedroom window, underwater deep sea diving, a flower in a pavement crack, mist over mountains, reeds in rivers, a rare wild cat, rolling desert dunes, the northern lights, a sycamore seed helicoptering down or a cotton wool cloud.

We want everyone to explore the colours, lights, shades, rhythms and patterns of nature. Moments that fill us with wonder.

No people and no pets, but otherwise any sort of nature goes.

Check out the promo video to get a sense of Heap's style, musically and otherwise.